A totally new phone design needs a totally fresh interface.
Samsung gave us a sneak peek at its foldable phone of the future on Wednesday at its annual developer conference in San Francisco.
Fully opened, it’s about the size of a tablet. Samsung calls this screen technology the Infinity Flex Display.
Samsung’s SVP of Mobile Marketing, Justin Dennison, pulled the foldable phone, rumored to be called the Galaxy X or Galaxy F, from his jacket pocket.
Closed, it’s the width of a regular phone.
Samsung said it shrunk or completely redesigned several components to make the two hemispheres thin enough to comfortably carry.
Samsung also refreshed the look of the software that rides on top of Android, calling it One UI. You’ll find it on Samsung phones going forward, including the foldable phone and likely the forthcoming Galaxy S10.
One UI only works with Android 9 Pie, and resembles some of Pie’s design concepts. The Galaxy S9 Plus running Android Oreo is on the left; on the right you have a demo Galaxy S9 Plus with One UI on Android Pie.
Large, rounded rectangles form the main theme, and you can enable a dark mode.
The changes to multitasking are stark. Now apps are separated by panes you can flick through horizontally, rather than vertically. You can also tap an icon below to open an app or swipe up to see them all. There are a few similarities to iOS here.
The new look extends to menus and submenus.
Although One UI is supposed to concentrate actions at the bottom of the screen, you still have to pull down from the top to see your notifications and quick settings.
Here’s the update to Bixby Home, which you get to by swiping to the left from the home screen.
Samsung’s edge interface looks about the same as it does now, with rounded icons.
You can enable the dark theme in the settings.
If you want to ditch the on-screen navigation buttons, a submenu lets you use full-screen gestures. Hard-press where the home button should be. Swipe up on either side of the space to go back or open your recents apps.
One UI aims to give you options when you need them and declutter when you don’t. For example, in the dialer here you see three navigation options at the bottom of the display.
Start dialing a number, and they disappear. Clear the number and they return to serve you.
Your contacts menu now groups people by alphabet, giving one more example of One UI’s quest to update Samsung’s phone navigation.
What we don’t see are all the ways One UI will work with a foldable phone’s various screen sizes and orientations. For that, we have to wait.
